Q Who Slice...

You've got a head on your shoulders. What are you doing in this argument?

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What I'm doing is getting fed up with the coded sexism underlying the "Troi can't drive" gag. It's just the old misogynistic joke about women drivers in a new context. How many times did male characters crash the shuttlecraft they were piloting? But nobody ever blames them for the crashes, because our culture doesn't have a built-in stereotype about male drivers being inept. Only Deanna gets this kind of abuse, and I'm sick of it.

Several, yes. Riley from "Unity" and Laura from "Unimatrix Zero" were taken at Wolf 359. Marika in "Survival Instinct" was taken from the Excalibur in an unspecified instance that could've been Wolf 359. Seven recovered the memories of a couple of Starfleet personnel in "Infinite Regress," including at least one Wolf 359 participant as well as an ensign from the starship Tombaugh, which was assimilated with its entire crew in 2362, several years before the official first contact in "Q Who." We also met a Romulan ex-drone in "Unity" and an assimilated Klingon general in "Unimatrix Zero." So there were no specific links to any TNG episodes other than BoBW.

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All of this to me shows VOY's complete lack of creativity with regard to its Borg plotting. Anytime they need a Borg reference, it's "Oh let's just throw out Wolf 359" regardless of whether it actually makes any sense. If they could be bothered to come up with something more plausible that didn't require rewriting established history to make it work... but no. Wolf 359 is the obvious Borg reference everyone will always get, so we don't need to work any harder than that.

It's like with Seven aswell. They needed her to be an adult in "Scorpion" so they had to say she'd been assimilated twenty years before the established first contact, screwing up continuity. Then a year later they come with the idea of the future-drone incubating to maturity in a matter of hours. If they'd just thought of that for Seven, they could have avoided rewriting all the history.

You've got a head on your shoulders. What are you doing in this argument?

Click to expand...

What I'm doing is getting fed up with the coded sexism underlying the "Troi can't drive" gag. It's just the old misogynistic joke about women drivers in a new context. How many times did male characters crash the shuttlecraft they were piloting? But nobody ever blames them for the crashes, because our culture doesn't have a built-in stereotype about male drivers being inept. Only Deanna gets this kind of abuse, and I'm sick of it.

Somehow I think assimilating Troi would lower the navigational perfection of the Collective...

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Bull. She was at the helm of an out-of-control, non-aerodynamic hunk of metal larger than an aircraft carrier and plummeting out of orbit, and she landed it flat and in one piece with zero casualties. That's astonishingly good piloting.

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Indeed, but I doubt she could have pulled it off without Data's help rerouting the controls, after all he could reroute around the crippled systems faster than any mere meat-bag could... and besides the whole "Troi is useless" routine is hilarious.

That said I shold mention that "On-screen Troi Is Useless." She gets portrayed better in the TNG novels than she does on-screen, the difference between character portrayals is night and day.

All of this to me shows VOY's complete lack of creativity with regard to its Borg plotting. Anytime they need a Borg reference, it's "Oh let's just throw out Wolf 359" regardless of whether it actually makes any sense.

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But the examples Christopher listed show that three assimilation references were to Wolf 359, while four were not. That's not "anytime".

And indeed VOY went out of its way to put a more interesting twist to every single Borg fact we thought we knew from TNG. First contact wasn't by Picard at J-25 in the 2360s, but by others, elsewhere, elsewhen. Borg babies weren't born but assimilated. The Drones had inner lives, and enjoyed many benefits. The Collective was complicated rather than simplistic, and had aims and goals beyond the obvious or the stated.

I have never gotten the argument that VOY "dumbed down" the Borg. Before VOY, they were half-baked cardboard villains, whipped out when a generic threat was needed and the Romulans had been used the previous week. Thanks to VOY, they became characters - indeed main characters worthy of opening credits!

You've got a head on your shoulders. What are you doing in this argument?

Click to expand...

What I'm doing is getting fed up with the coded sexism underlying the "Troi can't drive" gag. It's just the old misogynistic joke about women drivers in a new context. How many times did male characters crash the shuttlecraft they were piloting? But nobody ever blames them for the crashes, because our culture doesn't have a built-in stereotype about male drivers being inept. Only Deanna gets this kind of abuse, and I'm sick of it.

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You would hate the trailers for Voyager Virgin 1 is running in the UK: a series of captions between clips reading 'Lost, halfway across the galaxy, with a woman in charge. Figures'. Dreadful sexism, and not even coded (the one for Enterprise is almost as bad, but suggesting that you'll 'see a lot' of T'Pol is at least accurate at times).